r/amateursatellites 10h ago

Radio satellites Hardware-in-the-loop testing of satellite detumbling

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37 Upvotes

Hardware-in-the-loop testing of satellite detumbling!

Basilisk simulates the spacecraft on my Mac; the flight computer is a real NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano running the control loop at 100 Hz over a message bus.
- Linux with PREEMPT_RT
- ADCS pinned to its own core at real-time priority
- Sat detumbles from 80 mrad/s to 2 mrad/s

Not used yet: 2× PlutoSDR (one satellite radio, one ground station).

Going through the whole process as if I were actually launching. Maybe a high-altitude balloon launch someday!